I wanted you to hear my version of this Bob Dylan song on this day... 

This is the last track on my upcoming album Hymns From the Icons. 

 
When I first heard Mary Gauthier sing this song live, I was a 25-year-old know-it-all, playing alt-country music on the festival circuit. I had heard the recording, and had loved it from the start, but when I her her perform it, I knew it was a timeless song, and that she would be an iconic legend of a songwriter in her lifetime. I didn't know-it-all back then (nor do I today), but something I did know, was that I was right about this song, and about Mary. 

If ever there was a song to sing, as we stand in the midst of a Great Turning, trying not to let fear get the better of us, on the brink of the most strangely charged US election in history, it is this one.

It is a song that cries out for Jubilee. 

Cynthia Bourgeault has one of the keenest eyes for etymological nuance (and nearly... pretty much everything else), and she teaches that the word mercy is rooted in the word commerce, or merchant. Meaning, exchange. So when I sing this, I hear her words "mercy is not something God has so much as it’s something that God is." (Read her book Wisdom Jesus... please!!!)

The story of severance, or separation, that is trying to end, (but also scrambling to remain), is one that would have us think we are separate from mercy.

​If only we knew we were swimming in it.

How much more mercy we might offer, and how much more we might receive.

Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. 

May we be merciful now, in these coming days and weeks.

And may mercy flow like wine at a wedding feast.

To listen on apple music, click here.
To listen on spotify, click here.

This week, for a number of reasons, I felt it would a good connecting thing, if I went live on Facebook.

​It was a precious time with a lovely group of people from around the world.

Some people aren't on facebook so I made it available on youtube as well. 

There is a Latin term that was mostly adopted by the early Celtic Christians that is hard to define. The word is peregrinatio.

Peregrinatio sort of means, "to leave one's homeland and wander for the love of God".

In Esther de Waal's classic book, The Celtic Way of Prayer, she tells a story of three 9th century Irishmen, drifting over the sea in coracles... without oars.

Although my pilgrimage to Iona had a distinct destination, and was a return to ancestral homelands, much about the journey, spiritually speaking, was a treasure hunt that required my heart to be profoundly set adrift in an oarless coracle. It still is. At this very moment, I am moored to my unmooring, while in the very same breath, returning this week to my fidelity to a sacred schedule, after being thrown off course these past number of months. I've been struggling to sleep, my eyes like frenzied, empty, sockets, partly thanks to my 4-year-old, but also because I have been drifting in the modern sense. Too much stimulation. Modern drifting is not the same as being adrift on a pereginatio, a wandering pilgrimage for the love of God. Modern drifting allows all the bells and whistles to speed up our monkey brains, so we can avoid the Great Ache, the longing for the Beloved, while perhaps only gazing at suffering through the lens of click bait.

It felt appropriate to begin a new practice at our farm, in this week that I am releasing this remarkable song written by Mike Scott and originally performed by The Waterboys. We got our candles out, and are allowing the natural rhythm of sunlight and darkness to guide our day. I recently read that darkness causes a natural release of melatonin, and so instead of having our electric lights on in the evening, we gather around our wood cook stove with a candle or two, and tell stories. Then we pray from the Carmina Gadelica "kindle in my heart a flame of love, for my friend, for my foe, for my kindred all."

The rhythm in this song reminds me of the natural rhythm of a day. For the percussion, I mic'd the plywood floor of my studio and connected a stone from Columba Bay, Iona, to an antler bone from this farm, on these Anishinaabe lands. 

While I sang it, I held a stone from Columba Bay in each hand, that I had bathed in Brigid's wellspring. It felt like all the things I had said or read, about the universal Christ, were incarnating in the elements I held in my hand. And why not...? Columba called Christ, the Lord of the Elements.

For me, this song is a symbol of ancestral recovery, but it is also a symbol of peace for the whole world. When I returned from Iona last year, one of the first songs I wrote was White, White, World. A lament. A confession. And as I move forward... just expect that I will be journeying in these realms of paradox. What I might call "confessional ancestral recovery"... the deep work that must be done in tandem. Uncolonizing myself from this wasteland in search of the secrets my ancestors long to whisper to me. Tuning my becoming to the great Mystery. While simultaneously aiding/getting out of the way, of those groups who are currently emancipating themselves from this hostile/civil system/wasteland that has held them hostage for so long. 

So this week, in the midst of the near desperate madness of these political times, I invoke the Deep Peace. And I daresay, the deep peace will always be paradoxical, because God is an anthem for equity.

Earlier this week I brought down the thunder on white supremacy and hypocrisy in a facebook post. The context of my rage, was certainly connected to the horrendously exhausting and traumatizing presidential debate, but also, closer to home, I was so shaken by the story of Joyce Echaquan, a mother of 7, who died this week in Montreal, while nurses shamed her, and used racial slurs, and swore at her while she was dying. This woman went on facebook live while she was dying, or we would never know that it happened. 

In this video I speak a bit about how I know going deep is the wisdom, but there is a very fine line between going deep, and spiritually bypassing.

This week's Sunday Song is a sermon and a song that poured out of me when I read the parable of the two sons. (Matthew 21:23-32). I was asked by the Erickson Lutheran church to offer an online sermon, so welcome to all of you, and to all of my other Sunday Song readers/listeners.

In the video talk, I mention the context of this parable being told soon after Jesus has driven out the money changers and overturned the tables in the temple. In this text also, John the Baptist is mentioned, (who had already been beheaded).

I didn't mention it in the talk below, but I want to point out John Dominic Crossan's work on why John the Baptist was so disliked by people in power. So many people think he was beheaded for simply speaking out against divorce, (a clause used for centuries to try and keep especially women in abusive marriages). But once you know what Antipas was up to: setting up a commercial fishery on the Sea of Galilee, destroying the way of life for all of Jesus' fishing friends. And once you know that the divorce of his Arab wife, and the marriage of Herodias, was for the reason of attempting to gain more political power (that would further oppress these occupied Jewish territories), we can understand the public judgement from John the Baptist, and hear his fiery speech, as an outcry for justice. (I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of John Dominic Crossan's wonderful book The Greatest Prayer. I keep it at the ready nearly daily.)